Pain
by icarus abides
Summary: I left. I left and it was supposed to get easier.


_Set at some point in Season 5. No specific spoilers. I'm just testing out the fandom in the hopes that my muse will let me write some actual fic that makes sense instead of little snippets. _

_I don't have a beta so all mistakes are mine (and I'm sure there are several)._

_"I never thought I'd walk away from you._

_I did._

_But its a false sense of accomplishment,_

_every time i quit."_

_- Jimmy Eat World_

* * *

His rage is a tangible thing, slamming into her chest, and it takes everything in her not to take a step back at the force of it.

_How can it hurt this much_, she thinks. _I left. I left and it was supposed to get easier. _

Owen was right. She can't just suffocate this, hoping that it will wither away from neglect.

She isn't quite sure how her relationship-defective gay brother figured out her love life before she did.

* * *

When he comes, he makes sure to bury his face hard into the side of her neck, busying his tongue with the pulse he finds there. It's amazing how muffled a person's name came become.

His hands are supposed to find porcelain skin and raven locks. Instead there are tattoos and unfamiliar golden strands, and his brain just cannot yet seem to come to terms with that difference.

His body feels and tastes and smells Isabel, yet his traitorous heart beats a staccato _Alicia Alicia Alicia_.

He was in deposition yesterday and suddenly remembered what she tasted like on his lips. He was in court today and felt the ghost of her thigh locked around his hips.

She haunts him with memories of smiles and moans. Not even the anger is there anymore. It's all just so… empty.

And that may be what hurts worst of all.

Every evening now he slips into bed with whiskey on his breath and a willing blonde flush against him. It doesn't take thought. It doesn't take feeling.

He welcomes the mindlessness.

* * *

Alicia Florrick is a stranger. She looks in the mirror and sees herself (a few more wrinkles and under-eye circles but everything else vaguely familiar) and thinks '_Alicia_'. The problem is that there was Alicia Cavanaugh, then Alicia Florrick. Alicia the daughter, the student, the wife, and the lawyer. A half dozen disguises that she perfected over time. But none of her masks seem to fit quite right anymore; each a little more distorted than they used to be.

She covers her face with her hands, eyes looking out warily through spidered fingers, and wonders how much longer she can pretend to know the steps to this dance.

* * *

His pedestal is crumbling. Bit by bit, such insignificant erosion that he barely notices the tremors beneath his feet. Now and then he remembers - when he catches Diane giving him sidelong glances from across the way, when the other partners walk in twos and threes past his office and pointedly don't look at him - but he's too far gone. The moment passes and he simply buries this unsettled feeling with Greater Things. It's such a rush, this power, this almost maniacal scramble to make LG (make **him**) bigger and better and non-replacable.

New York. Los Angeles. If he can just stretch it a little more, that may just be enough.

It may be enough to remember how to feel it again, rather than simply go through the motions.

But it's not enough. Not yet.

He ignores the warning signs, the minute cracks growing larger each day. Uses an Irish bully to play the muscle and retreats into evenings filled with liquor and lust.

He is not invited to the next quorum.

When he finds out, it unnerves him that he doesn't know whether to be furious or relieved.

* * *

She wonders if, in the end, it had all been for naught. All the late nights and death row appeals and hail-mary legal plays. Because it doesn't seem like it matters much at the moment.

_Sometimes perhaps it just takes a little perspective_, she muses.

Her breaths are shallow, hitched as she tries to shift without actually moving too much. Her right hand grips at her neck, left hand braced on the floor in a sticky crimson puddle.

_It's too much_, she thinks absently, watching as the puddle turns into an ocean.

_Alicia._

The whisper is harsh, pain-filled, and her eyes dart from the blood to his worried eyes. For a moment, everything else stops. She can't hear the people screaming or the gunman shouting. Suddenly, it's twenty years of stolen kisses and study sessions, of mock trials and real courtrooms, and futures that kept winding back on one another time and time again. It's too much; not just this moment, but the memory of all of their could-haves and would-haves.

They always have had terrible timing.

Her throat tightens involuntarily and suddenly she not sure what hurts worse - crying or a bullet wound.

* * *

He feels again.

And goddamn, but it _hurts._

He closes his eyes and takes it all.


End file.
